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“It’s pretty unusual,” said Cook County Medical Examiner Stephen Cina, commenting on the rarity of cyanide poisonings. “I’ve had one, maybe two cases out of 4,500 autopsies I’ve done.”

Chicago Police Department spokeswoman Melissa Stratton confirmed the department was now investigating the death, and said detectives are working closely with the Medical Examiner’s Office.

Investigators will likely exhume the body, Cina said.

Khan, who owned a number of dry cleaners, had returned to Chicago from the hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia inspired to lead a better life and had sworn off buying lottery tickets — except just this once.

He stopped in at the convenience store near his home in the West Rogers Park neighbourhood on the city’s North Side in the summer and bought a ticket for an instant lottery game.

Convenience store clerk Ashur Oshana told The Associated Press on Monday that Khan had gone on the pilgrimage and told him he was done gambling. But Khan couldn’t resist and scratched off the winner in front of Oshana.

At an Illinois Lottery ceremony days later, Khan recalled that he jumped up and down in the store and repeatedly shouted, “I hit a million!”

“Winning the lottery means everything to me,” he said at the June 26 ceremony, also attended by his wife, Shabana Ansari; their daughter, Jasmeen Khan; and several friends. He said he would put some of his winnings into his businesses and donate some to a children’s hospital.

Khan opted for a lump sum of slightly more than $600,000. After taxes, the winnings amounted to about $425,000, said lottery spokesman Mike Lang. The cheque was issued from the state Comptroller’s Office on July 19.

Just before he was able to pick up his winnings, Khan woke up screaming in the night, according to police documents obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

He was pronounced dead that night at Chicago’s St. Francis Hospital.

Cyanide can be inhaled, swallowed or injected. Deborah Blum, an expert on poisons who has written about the detectives who pioneered forensic toxicology, said using cyanide to kill someone has become rare partially because it’s difficult to obtain and easy to detect — often leaving blue splotches on a victim’s skin.

“It has a really strong, bitter taste, so you would know you had swallowed something bad if you had swallowed cyanide,” Blum said. “But if you had a high enough dose it wouldn’t matter, because … a good lethal does will take you out in less than five minutes.”